1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of electronic game systems. More particularly, this invention relates to the field of handheld or portable electronic game playing consoles or units that are uniquely adapted to reversibly and completely translate one or more user controlled dynamic virtual game characters from a portable game playing unit to a shared, multi-dimensional, on-line virtual world of interacting animated digital characters, each additional digital character itself translated to the associated virtual world from its own user controlled portable game playing unit along with its own persistent characteristics, and/or to obtain a character or download a character from the Internet to the portable game playing unit.
2. Description of Related Art
Electronic or digital games have been with us since the 1970s. Long before the wide availability of personal computers and laptops, electronic games were appearing in arcades and commercial spaces as dedicated, freestanding gaming stations analogous to pinball machines with two-dimensional (2D) video screens and simple push button and joystick user controls. Game players or users would utilize these controls to manipulate simple animated objects such as space ships and ping-pong paddles displayed on the video screens to accomplish limited objectives and to score points.
Over the following decades, as digital, computer, and video technology evolved, game developers and designers quickly adapted their games to take advantage of the new features and capacities offered by these enhanced technologies. Electronic games became more complex and their graphic user interfaces through their video screens and displays became more realistic and engaging as computer processing speeds and data transfer rates increased. As developing technology overcame the early technical limitations to electronic game design game objectives evolved beyond simply scoring points to solving mysteries and unraveling secrets in increasingly complex environments. Previously, only textually based computer games analogous to interactive novels could address such complex plot and story lines. With advances in technology electronic games became challenging animated visual games with equally complex plots and sophisticated visual environments. Solving these complex games could take dozens of hours of playing time spread over days or weeks.
With the contemporaneous growth of the home computer market, electronic gaming moved from dedicated freestanding arcade gaming stations to personal computers at home and from there to the Internet where multiple players in different locations could participate in a common game with one another through on-line web servers.
These on-line gaming experiences grew into massively multi-player on-line role-playing games where hundreds, thousands, and even millions of individual players could participate and compete with one another on-line, simultaneously. Game action took place in multicolor virtual visual environments provided with depth perception, complex movement, and exotic virtual landscapes and topographies having Medieval, science fiction, or other stylistic themes to enhance the game playing experience with added degrees of realism and increasingly accurate physical properties and character movement capabilities.
At the same time, as microcircuitry and electronic video components became cheaper to produce and less energy demanding, small 2D video screens became more readily available, allowing electronic games to move in the other direction, toward simplified handheld or portable game playing stations. Typically designed for children, these portable video or electronic game toys initially took already popular electronic video games and known game characters having static visual appearances and characteristics and revised them to operate in the more limited 2D virtual environment provided by the portable game toy. With simplified graphics and character movements rendered in 2D, children were able to direct these characters with simple push buttons to control character movement or actions. Later handheld games were developed on their own to provide children with novel game experiences and activities involving new characters such as virtual pets requiring ongoing monitoring and involvement from the game user/pet owner.
More recently, game designers have worked to interconnect such handheld portable game playing units to allow children to interact with each other's game units and game characters on their own game unit displays. In some cases, objects such as bouncing balls or even game characters can move from one handheld game unit display to another electronically connected game unit display and back again. However, these shared, moving characters remain static when moving between game unit displays in that their two-dimensional visual representations and user controllable characteristics do not change when they move between displays.
Similarly, there is no real linkage or interface between the virtual environment and characters existing in the current handheld or portable 2D game playing units and their corresponding 3D personal computer or Internet counterparts. Instead, the current state of the art requires that handheld versions and corresponding computer based or Internet versions of a single game actually are independent, parallel software driven constructs that have been specifically designed and developed for each respective handheld or computer driven version of the game. Each independent version of the game sharing similar stylistic and graphic design themes and game playing elements specifically configured to operate in either the 2D handheld environment or in the 3D computer driven or Internet driven gaming environment.
This provides a game player who is familiar with the 2D handheld version of a game with a common, recognizable computer or Internet version of the game that is designed to operate in a different, more complex playing environment. Thus, a game player familiar with either the portable handheld version of a game or with the computer or Internet version of the game can play each similar version of the game utilizing the same basic themes, characters, functional features, and rules, in a different gaming environment having its own benefits and features. Namely, the handheld 2D game units, which in some cases have simple 3D graphics, provide the benefits of portability and simplicity while the 3D computer and Internet game versions provide enhanced graphics and potentially increased functions and capabilities to the game characters. However, the game player must purchase two different versions of the game to play in both operating environments.